Godzilla, King Of The Monsters stinks and is an almost complete waste of time. I went to this flick thinking, “at least it can’t be as bad as Godzilla in 2014,” and I was totally wrong. It stank even harder than the earlier film, but for the exact same reason: too much focus on the human characters. Any serious fan of kaiju films will tell you that any human interest is always secondary to the awesome spectacle of huge, nonhuman monsters destroying things and each other in horrible, prolonged battles where limbs are ripped off and heads burned to stumps by atomic fire breath.
There’s a little of that in GKOTM, maybe five minutes total kaiju action, tops. I am NOT exaggerating. The rest was nothing but one hokey, hyped up, would be dramatic scene after another with a bunch of two dimensional characters. I suppose they were doing the best they could with what they had, but the human protagonists, Kyle Chandler and Vera Farmiga, were positively painful to watch as they loudly attempted to fake parental grief. Charles Dance played the chief human villain, an “ecological terrorist,” who suddenly just disappears from the plot toward the end of the film in a glaring continuity gap.
The director, Michael Dougherty, also wrote the junk screenplay. He stinks. His direction is typical, current Hollywood shlock, way too long, a loud, throbbing score, constant cross-cutting, and an endless flurry of CGI imagery in a confused, muddy blur of events. This is especially true during the ever so brief battles between Godzilla and King Ghidorah. This was literally the smallest part of the film. I don’t know what Michael Dougherty was thinking about when he made this film, but he sure wasn’t thinking about me or the legions of other Godzilla fans.
GKOTM is an especially punk, lame effort compared to the Japanese film from 2016, Shin Godzilla, a brilliant remaking of the story of Japan’s tallest, darkest leading man. Like the first film from 1954 (only with state of the art special effects), Shin Godzilla is a genuinely terrifying experience as the forty story tall monster advances ever onward, grim, implacable, unstoppable, with nothing but death and destruction on his mind. SG is one of the greatest Godzilla movies ever made. The two Hollywood flicks are dreck. Americans are incapable of making a decent Godzilla film. This is a national disgrace. Only the Japanese know how to go about doing it apparently.
I have read that both the box office and critical reviews for the film are meh at best and that’s completely understandable. For anyone in the movie business reading this, I could do a better Godzilla film than this and what I know about film making you could put in your ear.
I recommend this film to absolutely no one.